Norway

Dateline Norway

5th August, 2025.

Series 2  Instalment 9

Are we in danger of becoming overstimulated by the beauty we experience around us? I don’t mean that in any negative way but I do sometimes wonder if we will reach a point when we will take nature’s spectacular beauty for granted. I may have hinted at it in the last post when I captioned a picture of a stunning waterfall with a not entirely ironic yawn. We see so much natural magnificence that sometimes we can’t see the wood for the trees.

We occasionally need to take a step back and have a break to really appreciate just where we are and what we are experiencing. But we are in Norway and there is just no escaping it. It slaps you soundly in the face at every turn. If Iceland and the Faroe Islands were hard to take in then this place is a whole new experience again.

We are spending about 20 days exploring the Wonders of Norway with the crew from  https://compassexpeditions.com/   . We start the journey in Hamburg, Germany where we meet the rest of our 14 strong contingent of adventurous Aussies including Jess, Stu and Julia, the team leaders from Compass who between them, finesse the whole cat herding process of managing 14 independent, curious and sometimes rambunctious people on motorcycles in a foreign land and hardly ever threaten to strangle most of us. They must have immeasurable patience.

 

From Hamburg we ride the short distance to the port city of Keil where we catch an over night ferry, which is actually a floating shopping mall complete with undercover parking and hotel rooms, to Oslo, the capital of Norway. We spend a day exploring this modern, progressive city and immediately some things become obvious. Norway is famous around the world for it’s sovereign wealth fund. That is, the government has taken all the royalties it has earned from North Sea oil and gas and invested them in a fund designed to improve living conditions in  the country. Currently the fund holds an amount equivalent to around $200,000 USD for every citizen of Norway! The interest alone amounts to several billion per year. Certainly the education and healthcare systems are the envy of most countries around the world. The road network and public transport systems are great

and there is a general air of prosperity about the place. However they also have a GST or VAT that applies to almost everything including food and it varies from 12 to 25%. They also charge vicious tolls on many major roads which often have to include ferries and/or tunnels. The general speed limit is 80kph and speed cameras are everywhere. The fines, we are told are outrageous. And for all this revenue collecting we still see homeless people on the streets. Maybe Australia is not so bad after all.

From Oslo we make our way north, there really is only north and south in Norway, east and west are not really a thing. Our first glimpse of Norwegian countryside has us totally enchanted with it’s fairy tale, postcard beauty. Then the mountains get bigger, the roads get windier, tunnels get more frequent and after a sequence of tunnels, some as long as 25km we pop out into the tiny village of Gudvangen sitting at the head of the most spectacular fjord imaginable. That evening we sit in a glass roofed restaurant, leaning back in our chairs to look at the 1000+ metre cliff tops on both sides, watching maiden hair waterfalls whisper out of the clouds and carried sideways on the winds high above while fishing boats and pleasure craft ply the turquoise waters of the fjords just outside our rooms. Pinch me!

Along the road today we have noticed several signs warning of moose in the area. The gift shops are full of moose paraphernalia and our restaurant tonight has moose silhouettes on the windows so we start a ridiculous conversation about such things as, if the plural of goose is geese then surely the plural of moose is meese. Similar logic would dictate that a baby moose is a mosling, a male moose is a mander and a group of meese must be a maggle. This nonsense, aided by liberal amounts of alcohol kept us amused for quite a while. Imagine the pants wetting, knee trembling hysteria when a few days later we see the real thing in a wheat field beside the road.

Next morning we avoid some of the tunnels and take the high road up to the tops of the aforementioned cliffs when, at a particularly magnificent lookout, Stu pulls the ultimate show stopper by getting down on one knee and proposing to long time partner, Jess and presents her with his grandmother’s ring. (She said yes in case you were wondering)

Try as it might, even Norway’s stunning scenery couldn’t top that. Not even another stunning fjord side village and a quaint 1937 family run hotel for the evening with views to the Jolstedalsbreen glacier, the largest glacier in mainland Europe covering an area of approximately 475 square km to a depth of 700m.

The next day involves more amazing Nowegian roads through beautiful Norwegian farmland past photogenically splendid villages to a one and a half hour ferry ride up the UNESCO World Heritage listed Geiranger Fjord.

After a comfortable night at the very swish Union Hotel we attack one of the most famous roads in the world, Trollstigen or the Trolls Ladder, a series of narrow, vertigo inducing switchbacks down a nearly sheer cliff and traversing a raging torrent of a waterfall, losing hundreds of metres of altitude in a few short kilometres.

 

We finish our day in the seaside town of Molde with more dramatic mountains as a backdrop.

What we haven’t mentioned so far is the weather. That’s because we can’t quite get our heads around the fact that it is T shirt and shorts stuff. And it’s humid. We realize it is summer here but we are just a couple of hundred kilometres below the Arctic Circle. In the days that follow we actually do cross into the Arctic at a point high on a mountain where there is a tourist tra…err I mean information centre with cafe and souvenir shops. The centre is strategically placed at altitude so that even on a warm day we get the sensation of Arctic chill in the air. The irony is of course that the actual Arctic Circle is constantly moving north at a rate of about 14m/year as the Earth wobbles on it’s axis on a roughly 40,000 year cycle. Therefore the circle itself is now some 300+ metres up the road from the reference point in the info centre.

Ferries and tunnels dominate any trip to Norway unless you really want to go hardcore and take some of the traditional routes so our relentless northward quest sees us pass through Hell (yes it’s a real place)

to yet another ferry from Bodo to Moskenes on the Lofoten Islands. The residents of Lofoten proudly proclaim that they live in the most beautiful place in the world and it is hard to argue against that claim. Until recently this place, a quiet fishing community has remained largely unknown to the outside world. Now the word is out and hikers, rock climbers, Viking history buffs, fishers, photographers, nature lovers, scuba divers,  motorcyclists and all sorts of adventure seekers are flocking here in ever greater numbers. Local authorities are scrambling to find ways to manage the influx. A few of us investigate some Viking history, others go scuba diving, Julia goes hiking and the smart ones just sit back, relax and take it all in. After all it is 27 deg C! People are at the beach swimming, IN THE ARCTIC!

From here we have chosen to take the three day trip on the Hurtigruten (Hurdi Gurdi)  Nordkap Express, the coastal freighter and passenger ferry south to the city of Bergen where we will be back on the bikes for a few days before we end the trip just as we began in Hamburg.

So for now I am sitting at my porthole window watching the magnificence of  Norway’s Western fjords slide by.